This Day in History – April 30
Today is the 120th day of 2013. There are 245 days left in the year.
TODAY’S HIGHLIGHT
2004: Ten countries join the European Union bloc in a historic enlargement that unites a region separated for decades from the West by barbed wire and Soviet ideology. The EU’s biggest expansion in its 47-year history adds the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Slovakia and Slovenia — along with Cyprus and Malta. Together, they boost the EU’s population to 450 million people.
OTHER EVENTS
1789: George Washington is inaugurated as the first president of the US.
1803: The US doubles in size with the purchases of the Louisiana Territory and New Orleans from France.
1881: France invades Tunisia from Algeria on a pretext, and later establishes a protectorate.
1900: Hawaii becomes a territory of the US.
1945: Adolf Hitler commits suicide in his Berlin bunker with his new wife, Eva Braun.
1948: The Organisation of American States holds its first meeting, in Bogota, Colombia.
1953: People’s Progressive Party wins first election in British Guyana.
1977: Argentina’s Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo hold first weekly march to demand return of their disappeared children.
1986: Soviet government says 197 people were hospitalized following Chernobyl nuclear power plant disaster, that plant’s reactor has been shut down and radiation levels are dropping.
1993: Tennis star Monica Seles, the world’s number 1 player, is stabbed with a kitchen knife in Hamburg, Germany, by a supporter of her German rival Steffi Graf.
1995: US President Bill Clinton ends US trade and investment with Iran, accusing the Tehran government of supporting terrorism.
1997: An airlift starts to ship Rwandan refugees, trapped in Zaire and hunted by rebels, back to Rwanda.
2005: Insurgents unleash another day of deadly bombings in Iraq’s capital and beyond, staging a series of assaults that kill at least 65 people over two days and appear timed to deflate hopes that the installation of the nation’s first democratically elected government would curb spiking violence.
2006: Nepal’s Parliament calls for a ceasefire with communist rebels and elections for an assembly to rewrite the constitution.
2007: A gasoline tanker crashes and bursts into flames near the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge in the US state of California, creating such intense heat that a stretch of highway melts and collapses. The driver walks away from the scene with second-degree burns.
2009: Iraq war formally ends for British forces as America’s main battlefield ally hands control of oil-rich Basra area to US commanders and prepares to ship out its remaining 4,000 troops.
2010: Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi insists that his government will serve out the remaining three years of its term, despite mounting infighting and trouble within his coalition.
TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS
Casimir III The Great, Polish king (1310-1370); Jacques-Louis David, French artist (1748-1825); Carl Friedrich Gauss, German mathematician (1799-1855); Kaspar Hauser, German mystery youth (1812-1833); Corinne Calvet, French-born actress (1926-2001); Carl XVI Gustaf, King of Sweden (1946-); Kristen Dunst, US actress (1982-).
— AP
